Kevin Dean is a professor at UT Southwestern pioneering autonomous microscopes and applying them to study rare biological events, mainly metastatic colonization. In our conversation we talk about his research and the current status of microscopy. Kevin was raised in a small town in Northern California earning his BA in Chemistry at Willamette University in Oregon, and was recognized twice as an ESPN Regional Academic All-American Running Back. He then received his PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Colorado in the labs of Amy Palmer and Ralph Jimenez. Where he focused on spectroscopy, protein engineering, and multi-parameter high-throughput microfluidic analyses and cell sorting. After earning his PhD, Kevin established the first campus-wide light microscopy facility at the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado.  He then moved to UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas to perform his postdoctoral research with Gaudenz Danuser and Reto Fiolka. Now Kevin runs a lab at UT Southwestern that develops technologies that enable the identification and molecular interrogation of exceedingly rare biological events, including metastatic colonization.